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This was one of the things that just bugged me to the point where I needed to actually sit down and figure it out. Here is the complete picture:The data is pretty straight forward, recording 2 extremes (high/low) within each “hour” and storing them into a 10 minute bin. The question is: Why does the area where the extremes are vary so much from hour to hour? Personally, I had a hard time seeing the relationship and working it out in my head until I had all of the sets complete. Can you see a pattern?

When I think about extremes, I think about what I call the leading extreme, which is more or less the same as the “trend direction”. Take the following snapshot, where i’ve deleted the time stamps so that we can make them up.Let’s assume that we are looking at a typical case where the yellow lines are representing xx:00; That is, 33% of the time an extreme is located in the last 10 minutes of the hour. The yellow circle is representing that the extreme is indeed in the last 10 minutes. Great! Now if you imagine the vertical yellow lines shifting over 10 minutes, now starting at xx:10, we can see that price dips down, and the high extreme is still located at that peak, which is some time between xx:50 and xx:00. So why is the probability 33% in some cases and as low as 12% in others?

Because of the trailing extreme. Let’s take a look at a side by side:Again, assume the times of the first extremes to be xx:00-xx:10 and xx:50-xx:00 as shown by the yellow circles. Now if we shift the time forward by 10 minutes, the extremes are now xx:10-xx:20 and xx:50-xx:00. The “leading” extreme time has not changed, but the first extreme (the low) has now been shifted 10 minutes forward.

This means that when price is like above, in a healthy/strong trend, or occurring in an area where price moves in one direction only for a period of over 10 minutes, it creates a varying extreme on one end, even if the other end (the high in this case) remains the same.

The big question now: Does it matter? Maybe.
I mean it’s not completely insignificant. The biggest probabilities within each set are not that small, at least twice as big as the ones that are least likely. If you take the two largest probabilities in each set (which are always next to each other), the number ends up being close to or over 50%. That is, no matter what time you use as your start time, a particular 20 minute period will contain an extreme 50% of the time. That is, 33% of time will contain 50% of extremes. That’s pretty cool!

With this understanding, the relationship is a bit clearer now. Given how the trailing extreme functions, The higher probability numbers are occurring where we expect them to be: 10 minutes trailing.. for the most part.
There’s something that sticks out very clearly, and that’s the pause that happens from the xx:30 start to the xx:40 start. Remember that the binned number is the max. This means that for both those periods, the minutes of xx:20-xx:29 contain an extreme more often than any other 10 minute chunk. Therefore, the stats seem to favor the xx:20-xx:29 period as the best period to be making extremes of all time frames by a slight margin.

One of the problems I encountered when I was first getting into research was the idea of the “daily” candle. We know that because the market is 24 hours, there are many ways to draw the daily candle and it varies from broker to broker. If you strictly trade candle patterns, this can be an issue. When I was tracking the hour of the day that the highs and lows occur, some hours were more favored depending on what hour I used as the “first hour” of the day.

In the long run, this problem kind of disappears as one focuses less on the candles and more on the overall price direction because it requires one to take enough candles into account that the overall picture is the same regardless of which view you use. But when one is looking specifically at a single candle, I can see this type of analysis making a difference.

The follow up with this is that when you look at a micro level, is this also true? Is 00:00-00:59 different from 00:20-01:19?

Yes. The bin here is representing the 10s digit in the hour, i.e 00 means an extreme occurred between 00 and 09, or the first 10 minutes of the hour. Movement is movement and patterns that occur in higher time frames are present in lower time frames, but time does play a difference when one looks at things minute by minute. Within a span of 60 minutes, it is more difficult to create more “complex” structures. As a result, the time that the hour starts on is more likely to contain a price extreme because price is more directional in these frames.

Interestingly, a pattern that I noticed on altered charts makes a big difference depending on the hour reference. If one assumes random movement, the probability for a continuous 20 minute segment to contain at least one of the extremes to be about 33% (with each 10 minute span being 1/6 of the total, 1/6 + 1/6). Perhaps, given the one-dimensional movement of lower frames, it may not be crazy to see a number like 50%. However, the number can be pulled to quite the extreme, and the probability for a specific 20 minute segment to contain at least one extreme can be over 75% on some cases depending on the hour reference and the minute span.